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I have run into the same Agile mentality at my last two companies. It seems that developer interchangeability is "the elimination of siloed skills" that is the Agile buzzword of the day. Both companies were experiencing developer turnover and reductions.
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Fascinating. Now that sorta makes sense with what is going on. I wonder if they notice they aren't producing any software?
Were those companies choosing to reduce the number of developers or were they just leaving?
I think the question will be "are you still going to produce software"? And then "who is going to produce it"?
... So, "we need interchangeability of skills". "That sounds like a great idea, I could use some help". "How are we going to do get people up to speed with the tools we use"? Ya know, it really fits with the amazing loss of talent we've had. 2/3 of the team is gone. There is no one to maintain the systems I built and always maintained. Well, ... the pressure is on. Yesterday, my former manager said that the project timeline would need to be doubled. The new "HR manager" said that I and the two new guys (MS ecology, not Open Source) would need to step up and start that project moving. I mentioned that I've been working 11+ hour days. Better still, I told them from the start that that technology was unmaintainable by mortals. I wonder how long it will take.
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First company was restructuring and attrition. Second company was a mixture of constant firings, attrition and dictatorship Agile driving good developers away. Three developers left my first month and the rate reduced a bit, but was still constant. I was a contractor let go after 9 months.
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My first IT job was as a Trainee Programmer, working on an ICL 1901, with 16K, (words), of memory and no hard disk. All data processing was done via mag tape.
Programs (COBOL & Plan Assembler) were hand-written on coding sheets and punched on to paper tape, by the punch & verify team. Your program was compiled overnight, by the operators, and in the morning you arrived in fear of the missing full-stop, that generated dozens, (sometimes hundreds) of compile errors. There was no Development, Test or UAT systems. Just Production.
These days, I tweak a few lines of code; build/compile; unit test; repeat. Sometimes dozens of times for the same routine - because I can't be @rsed to think through how the whole program should work. And then I have the 'safety nets' of Code Review, QA and UAT.
Who'd have thought 40 years ago, I'd be sitting here today with my own computer (with a screen!) gradually honing my code until I manage to get something close to working. Back then I'd have been happy to have a sharp pencil.
In those days, you had to be disciplined and you had to get everything right. The young people of today...
The Four Yorkshiremen Sketch - YouTube[^]
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I don't believe you 
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ICL 1904 under George III for me (university computer). Punched cards that you had to punch yourself, and operators who dropped them just for the heck of it.
First actual job was a Prime 400 at 0.5 MIPS, 8 MB of memory, and 160 MB HDD. This ran with 32 concurrent users logged in and working. Gawd knows how, that wouldn't run a digital watch these days ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Ah, Harvard architecture. I like that. Many registers in the processor, memory may have the weirdest word formats. Sounds like fun.
And you would not believe what you get when some former mainframe guys decide to design a microprocessor that way, a hybrid between Harvard and Princeton (aka. von Neumann) architectures with the somewhat limiting word size of 8 bits.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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I started as an operator on a LEO III - 16k words of memory, card and paper tape input (and output), and magnetic tape for speed. One of the best features of the LEO was the radix register which allowed it to do calculations in LSD. Learned machine code programming in my spare time (in between drinking and chasing girls).
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Richard MacCutchan wrote: the radix register which allowed it to do calculations in LSD
Did you mean BCD, or was this computer designed by Timothy Leary? 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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No I mean our old currency: £sd - pounds, shillings - of which there were 20 in a pound, and pence - of which there were 12 in a shilling.
So £2/13/11 + £5/8/4 = £8/2/3.
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I know what UK currency was like before decimalisation, but I've never seen it called LSD. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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It's from the Latin: Libra, solidi, denarii.
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What prompted this post, was realizing how incredibly easy Software Development is now days. I was being incredible lazy: changing a few lines of code; testing; and then back round to do the next few lines. Which I suspect is the norm these days.
Imagine having to write an entire program, (in COBOL or Assembly language), by hand. And, if it compiled, the next step was to put it into production! If it didn't work our options were either put a, machine code, patch into memory and rerun or splice the mod into the paper tape, recompile and run. How scary is that? 
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Dude, I thought I was old.
When I came into the digital world from analog instrumentation there were already Rk05 2.5mb disk pack style drives and the glorious vi editor in play.
That must have just sucked to see the next morning coming.
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Not really, no - we saw it as a natural progression, and tools to make life easier.
Mostly because we all knew the old way worked-but-was-sh*t and the new way almost-worked-but-was-way-easier.
Except vi: nobody could ever remember how to get out of that.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I started with paper tape via a teletype machine on an acoustic coupler to a remote IBM way off in the big city (Manchester). Later I worked with Pr1me computers at the polytechnic - they had greenscreens, advanced technology. I still remember getting 50+ error messages from one missing full stop - none of which mentioned the aforesaid full stop. Eventually got a real job working on ICL equipment (2960s I think) but back to punch cards. We also wrote the code (FORTRAN IV) on coding sheets which were processed by "punch girls" to create overnight compilation runs, debugging involved changing out one or more cards, occasionally punched personally (when the unions weren't being awkward) and eventually straight into production - no, test system. Lots of finger crossing! A year or so later we got green screens but the head of the department hated them and tried to make us stick to punch cards for another year until they took the machines away. He also hated Fortran-77 on the VAX machines we used for the real-time system. He couldn't cope with names longer than six characters in mixed case!
I won't mention the compulsory flowchart requirements... oops, just did.
Aah, the good ol' days!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Quote: I won't mention the compulsory flowchart requirements... oops, just did.
I go back to the 60's. I remember a human factors course I took in the mid 70's. The professor said they had done an experiment to test flow charters versus non flow charters. Seems the flow charters got their program running with fewer compiles but the non flow charters made friends with the mainframe operators and got more runs. Time came out about the same.
I still have my plastic template around here somewhere. Same drawer with my slide rule
If you can keep your head while those about you are losing theirs, perhaps you don't understand the situation.
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I still have my flowchart template somewhere. Going to spend the next 5 hours trying to find, it!! 
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I found that the surest way to get more runs was to occasionally show up in the machine room with 12 dozen homemade, still warm chocolate chip cookies (one advantage of living fairly close to work). I could've gotten away with murder for at least a couple of weeks after that.
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and I thought I was old! I started on an AS400
To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer
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When I started, the first project I was on used a Honeywell 200, a Four Phase mini, a Perkin-Elmer (later Interdata) 8/32 and an IBM 370/158, with languages including Assembler (3 different flavors), Cobol, Fortran, PL/I and RPG, plus MVS JCL. Somewhere around here I still have the textbooks and manuals for the IBM side of things; the others have all thankfully vanished into the mists of time.
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5teveH wrote:
The Four Yorkshiremen Sketch - YouTube[^]
Sounds just like this forum, albeit hilarious.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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5teveH wrote: The Four Yorkshiremen Sketch - YouTube[^]
When I were a young'un, we had to do all our computing on stone henge, with missing stones!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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5teveH wrote: Your program was compiled overnight
By 'eck lad, you 'ad it easy! When I started we had to punch the 'oles into leather straps with our teeth, then walk 500 miles to feed it by 'and through t'reader, and output was by electric shock!
No but seriously, hand-punched cards (eventually we got one of these[^]) using a hand-held thingy. It was a chunk of metal with 12 square holes in it, and a square "poker" thing you used to push individual chads out, having looked up the hole pattern for the character you wanted. Then you sent the card deck off by post (from the Post Office) to the University, and a couple of weeks later you got your punching errors back. You re-punched, sent it off, and if you were lucky got your compilation errors back. Eventually you got "Hello World" or the equivalent, and jumped for joy!  That was at school...
But yes, once graduated and working in London, initially we wrote out Cobol coding sheets by hand, sent them down to the girls in the punchroom (you were supposed to leave them in the tray outside, but going in was too much temptation for some). The next day you'd take your cards down to the ops room; we had both ICL1904 machines with George III (and a teletype interface too!) or the faster IBM 360 machine. Remember "the well" on the ICL machines - effectively a queue of waiting jobs, but a prioritised one where, as a junior programmer doing testing, your jobs were being constantly overtaken by production work. Some jobs, those needing significant resources (like more than 32kwords), might sit in the well for days... then oh! the Joy of a VDU screen with TSO!
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As kids, we used to draw on these manilla coloured cards with little rectangles missing. Always different to each other and seemingly nonsense patterns.
Years later, found out they all belonged to a single program which had been scattered when Mum tripped over crossing the road at Uni one day.
I still miss the HP calculator Dad used to borrow from work sometimes that took little sticks with magnetic tape on em for storing programs. (Perhaps a HP29C) Playing that moon-lander simulation was teh best! 
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